Apple released an awesome backup feature called Time Machine back in 2007 when OS X 10.5 Leopard was introduced. Why? Essentially Apple spent the decade building awesome computers in the digital life concept of music, photos, and movies. Apple likely realized that backup solutions, aside from cloning the entire computer, were a bit heavy and hard(ish) to implement by general users. With Time Machine, Apple essentially made a backup solution that’s easy-to-use, works in the background, and is essentially “plug in and forget about it”. “Backup made easy,” if you will.

The amazing thing Time Machine does is that it creates incremental backups, allowing you to step back in time to a previous version of a file. This feature has saved my butt more than a few times when I’ve accidentally overwritten a master Photoshop file, or whenever an important file goes missing. I can just go into to Time Machine and retrieve it from the past.

Time Machine also does a massively valuable trick… it’ll let you restore your Mac to a previous state in the OS. Yup, you can make your Mac go back in time as a whole as well! Article Continues…